The Democrats, Looking for Their Future

Today's quiz: What is a Democrat?

A) Heir to and defender of the New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier and Great Society, and all they encompass -- from Social Security and Medicare to the progressive income tax, racial justice and civil rights, federal aid to education, relative fiscal sanity, strong international alliances and institutions, etc.

B) A "progressive" in the culture wars of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, supportive of minorities, tolerant of homosexuals, in favor of gun control and abortion rights, on the side of stronger environmental controls, opposed to the posting of the Ten Commandments in U.S. government buildings and courthouses, etc.

C) A believer in the use of government to make society more just and to give more Americans more opportunities to advance themselves.

D) A pragmatist who believes in trial and error, experiment and discovery, but usually not in ideological certainties.

E) A largely irrelevant voice whistling in an unfamiliar wind.

You've probably figured out the correct answer: All of the above. And therein lies the Democrats' real dilemma.

We've already had at least two rounds of glib explanations from the punditocracy for the Nov. 2 results. In the first wave, the Democrats were done in by "moral values" -- or by evangelical Christians or by their own selection of a Massachusetts liberal as their presidential candidate. In the second wave, you heard a lot of "not-so-fast" sound bites: Hey, John Kerry did fine, he got millions more votes than any previous Democratic candidate; 70,000 changed minds in Ohio would have made him president; religious people voted for Kerry too; Democrats actually made gains around the country in state legislatures.

These one-liners have the usual value of sound bites: not much. In the long run, "All of the above" remains the Democrats' biggest problem. Today's Democrats know what they aren't; voters know too. The Kerry campaign was constructed almost entirely around this knowledge: "We are not Bush" or "We are the anti-Bush." Wasn't that really the Kerry team's message? The campaign's slogan was "We can do better." But the country, or 51 percent of it, wasn't convinced, and decided it preferred to stick with what it had and knew.

Is the Democrats' cause now hopeless? Think how Republicans felt exactly 40 years ago this weekend. Lyndon B. Johnson had just given Barry Goldwater a drubbing for the ages, winning 61 percent of the vote (as compared to George W. Bush's 51 percent) and 486 electoral votes (Bush won 286). After that election, the Democrats held the Senate by a 68-32 margin and the House by 295-140. Talk about hopeless!

Yet four years later, a Republican named Richard M. Nixon was elected president. Twelve years after that, Ronald Reagan brought a brand-new and more conservative Republican Party into power, where it has now won five of the last seven presidential elections and, in 1994, took control of Congress.

In politics, as in life, stuff happens. In those cases, the stuff involved both fortuitous circumstances (Nixon's election) and careful planning plus tireless work (leading to Reagan's and subsequent Republican successes). Before they quaff the hemlock, Democrats might want to study this history. New versions of all the strategies and devices that made those Republican victories possible are available to the Democrats now. But they'll be useful only if Democrats confront the fact that very few Americans who are not Democrats today know what the label "Democrat" might mean to them -- or worse, they assume it would mean something unwelcome.

Democrats older than 55 or so think it's easy to explain who they are. But their litany of heroes and accomplishments, from FDR and Social Security to Bill Clinton's balanced budgets, consists of things that must look to younger voters like history, or ancient history. Next August, the Social Security program will celebrate its 70th birthday!

When conservatives reconstructed the Republican Party from the '60s through the '90s, they never invoked the achievements of earlier GOP presidents. By the time of the Republican National Convention of 1980, held in Detroit, the Moral Majority and its allies were much more important influences in the party than old-line Republicans whose heroes had been relative moderates, such as Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois (Senate Republican leader from 1959 to 1969) or virtual liberals, like Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York and briefly Gerald Ford's vice president, or William Scranton, governor of Pennsylvania. The GOP of the 1970s provided a comfortable home to an ideologically diverse coalition; today it has become a staunchly conservative party .